The Department of Pathobiology is one of five departments within the School of Public Health and Community Medicine. The School is one of 24 Schools of Public Health accredited by the Council on Education for Public Health. The School is part of the Health Sciences Center, which also includes Schools of Dentistry, Medicine, Nursing, and Pharmacy. The training faculty within the Department of Pathobiology are located at the University and at nearby facilities including the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, Infectious Disease Research Institute, Pacific Northwest Research Center, Seattle Biomedical Research Institute, and government facilities. The department has had a Master's degree program since its beginning in 1970 and an approved Ph.D. program since the fall of 1990. Between 1970 and 2001, 43 Ph.D. students and 79 M.S. students received their degrees as a result of training in our program. The Department of Pathobiology stands at an interface between fundamental biology and clinical medicine. The emphasis is on population approaches to disease problems and on understanding disease processes. The ultimate goal of our program is to elucidate unique mechanisms or characteristics of disease that can result in the development of proved methods of diagnosis, prevention, and control. The specific objectives of the training program are to train graduate students and postdoctoral fellows in the application of principles and theories of modern biotechnology to specific disease problems. The Pathobiology program provides a link between molecular approaches and public health. This is supported by the course requirements in our graduate program, which include core courses in Pathobiology emphasizing disease concepts, and courses in epidemiology, biostatistics, immunology, and molecular biology. The multiple research collaborations melding our laboratory-based training with other public health disciplines offer unique opportunities to conduct multidisciplinary studies on diseases in human populations. The combination of diverse research and classroom environments provide a strong integrated approach to enable trainees to prepare for and deal most effectively with the impact of disease on global public health.